Punch Lines

“The Fighter” and “I Love You Phillip Morris.”

Is David O. Russell’s “The Fighter” really a boxing movie? It certainly reeks of the ring, and the plotline, culled from life, follows the ascent of Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), a welterweight from Lowell, Massachusetts, who became a world champion in 2000, and remains a hero to his people today. Split the movie into a dozen rounds, though, and only about three of them would be adjudged boxing-based. What powers “The Fighter” is not glory with gloves on but the rough, bare-knuckled rapport that Ward maintains with his mother and his siblings. This is, in the fullest and sweatiest sense, family entertainment.

The resident matriarch is Alice (Melissa Leo), herself as hard as a heavyweight. Even her hair is hard, brushed up and styled to the point of immobility. You might think her poor husband merely henpecked until you watch her sling pots and pans at him, across the kitchen, for daring to question her judgment. Some pecking. Some hen. Alice has borne a formidable brood, including a squadron of Celtic daughters—seven of them, sometimes all shouting abuse at once. I used to think the witches in “Macbeth” were a scary bunch, but Alice’s girls make them look like the Andrews Sisters. As for Micky, he is the cynosure of his mother’s eye. “All we ever wanted for you was to be world champion,” she tells him. No pressure there, then. Micky is trained by his half brother, Dicky (Christian Bale), a former boxer. He once had Sugar Ray Leonard on the floor, he says—and goes on saying, to anyone who will listen, though rumor has it that Leonard slipped. But most people no longer listen to Dicky. Halfway between skeleton and ghost, he lives in a crack house.

Bale is the first thing we see in the film. Gaunt as a saint preparing for martyrdom, his eyes gazing without a blink from sunken sockets, he jabbers and grins; there is a film crew within the film, making a documentary for HBO, and he’s hopped up by the presence of the camera. (It takes us a while to realize that Micky, tacit and modest, is sitting right next to him.) The starlight lingers even when Dicky, having impersonated a police officer and then assaulted a real one, goes to jail and shivers through cold turkey. When his program finally airs, he parades through his fellow-cons, enrobed in their applause, and takes his seat in front of the TV, like a god before his own altar. All of this creates a dazzling portrait of delusion, and one hell of a cautionary tale for any viewers planning to curdle their brains with drugs, but there’s a hitch: so thoroughly does Bale embrace the part that the dazzle threatens to outblaze the drama. You don’t find yourself thinking, What a wild and wasted soul that Dicky is. You think, Wow, look at Christian Bale playing a wild and wasted soul. What an ace job he’s doing. So much acting.

There’s a hint, but only a hint, of the same thing in Amy Adams, in the role of Micky’s girlfriend, Charlene. As she bends over in denim hot pants, at the bar where she works, to reveal a tattoo at the base of her spine, we realize that Charlene represents a radical departure for Adams, who may well be starting to tire of all the nuns, cooks, princesses, and other assorted honeys she normally gets to play. There is nothing honeyed about Charlene; against stiff competition she has the dirtiest mouth in the movie, though her task is a virtuous one—to pull Micky from the wreckage of his kin, as if from a burning plane. “Everybody said I could beat him,” Micky tells her, after a disastrous, cheek-splitting bout with a fighter almost twenty pounds heavier. “Who’s everybody?” Charlene asks. “My mother and my brother,” Micky says. As for what the mother makes of that brother, we are asked to believe that Alice doesn’t truly understand Dicky’s crack habit until she sees it aired, or smoked out, on HBO. Yeah, right. Not even Melissa Leo, fierce and flinty actress that she is, can pull that one off.

For all the bluster, “The Fighter” jostles dangerously close to the corny. Maybe that’s an occupational hazard of the boxing movie, which traditionally balances the physical prospect of beating someone out of his senses with the more edifying notion of having good sense beaten back in. Hence the “Rocky” franchise, and hence the conventional climax of “The Fighter,” with Micky confronting an Irishman named Shae Neary (Anthony Molinari), who appears to be hewn from basalt. We could be watching a Ron Howard picture. In short, it’s a curious project for David O. Russell, the maker of “I Heart Huckabees” (2004), and the jitters in mood here, from melodrama to semi-farce, and from blue-collar grit to teary triumphalism, suggest a director striving to keep control of bumpy material. When Russell broke through, with “Three Kings” (1999), the result was no less multilayered, but it was a found complexity, you felt, inherent in the messiness of war, to which Russell was calmly doing justice.

There is a Micky Ward story, ironically, that might have suited Russell better. Not the one that closed with Neary, in 2000, but the one that began two years later, with the first of Ward’s three matches against Arturo Gatti—a three-act drama if ever there was one, starring two guys who, when they weren’t trying to annihilate each other, became loyal friends. To some aficionados, the first was the fight of the century so far. Even in the mini-ring of YouTube, it’ll knock you flat, whereas “The Fighter,” for all the dedication of its players, takes a heavy swing at us, and misses.

Despite the title, “I Love You Phillip Morris” is not a bravely unfashionable hymn of praise to the tobacco industry. What it offers, more implausible still, is a chance to see Jim Carrey make out with Ewan McGregor. The chance arises when Steven Russell (Carrey) goes to jail for fraud and falls, at first gasp, for the Phillip of the title (McGregor), a gentle ginger-blond with an accent quivering somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. The rest of the film is absorbed less by the pursuit of love—for Phillip returns Steven’s affections forthwith—than by the headlong pursuit of everything that will make the love run sweetly. Here, you might say, is a genuine romance, its ardor unquenched by distance, confinement, and death. On the other hand, in the touching words of Phillip: “Enough romance. Let’s fuck.”

In some ways, we are not that far from “The Fighter.” Both movies present a prison term less as an ordeal than as something manageable, redemptive, and useful. Both are also based on fact; according to the final credits of “I Love You Phillip Morris,” the true Steven Russell currently resides in a Texas penitentiary—on twenty-three-hour lockdown, if you can believe it. The moral of the film, however, is that you can’t believe anything at all, not with Steven around. Mendacity is his proper state. Not content with a sheaf of dodgy credit cards, he pretends to be the chief financial officer of a major company, and thinks nothing of adopting the weighty tones of a judge, on the phone, to get himself bailed. This brand of shape-shifting is as easy as pie for Carrey, and I like the idea of all that elasticated verve and boundless good will being turned to nefarious ends. So why has the movie languished on remand, awaiting release since January, 2009, when it screened at Sundance? Don’t Carrey addicts merit quicker service?

Well, aside from those who may be mildly discomfited by watching their hero whoop and holler like a rodeo rider as he gets it on with a gentleman described in the credits as “The Moustached Man,” many will find the film’s geniality wearing thin and false. You could argue that falsity is Steven’s stock-in-trade, but there is a further, more unpleasant falsity in the guttering emotional tone. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, the writers of “Bad Santa” (2003), wrote and directed this movie, and once again they proceed on the assumption that taste is no more than a silly shackle, to be snapped and tossed away. Is it that funny, though, to be shown how to fake your own death from AIDS? And how does such deceit affect the flashback in which Steven professes love to an earlier partner, who is dying of the same disease? Are all tears meant to be crocodile? Steven tries to catch us out, at regular intervals, with a shot of unreliable narration (“Oh, did I forget to mention I’m gay?” or “There’s something I didn’t tell you”), but the filmmakers’ attempt to enshrine him as an enigma, unknowable and arcane, is defeated by our dawning realization that he is, unmistakably, a jerk. At best, “I Love You Phillip Morris” may be hailed as a necessary step in Hollywood’s fearful crawl toward sexual evenhandedness; the film upholds the constitutional right of every gay man to be as much of a liar, a crook, and a creep as the rest of us. Makes you proud. ♦